late have I loved thee

.

Late have I loved thee, O Beauty 

so ancient and so new;
late have I loved thee! For behold, 

thou wert within me and I outside;
and I sought thee outside

 and in my unloveliness
fell upon these lovely things 

that thou hast made. 

Thou wert with me and I

 was not with thee.
I was kept from thee by those things,
yet had they not been in thee,

 they would not have been at all. 

Thou didst call and cry to me

 and break open my deafness. . . .

I tasted thee, and now hunger

 and thirst for thee;
thou didst touch me,
and now I burn for thy peace. 

~ Saint Augustine of Hippo
from Confessions

 

 

.

her longing

Before this longing,
I lived serene as a fish
At one with the plants in the pond,
The mare's tail, the floating frogbite,
Among my eight-legged friends,
Open like a pool, a lesser parsnip,
Like a leech, looping myself along,
A bug-eyed edible one,
A mouth like a stickleback,-
A thing quiescent!

But now-
The wild stream, the sea itself cannot contain me:
I dive with the black hag, the cormorant,
Or walk the pebbly shore with the humpbacked heron,
Shaking out my catch in the morning sunlight,
Or rise with the gar-eagle, the great-winged condor,
Floating over the mountains,
Pitting my breast against the rushing air,
A phoenix, sure of my body,
Perpetually rising out of myself,
My wings hovering over the shorebirds,
Or beating against the black clouds of the storm,
Protecting the sea-cliffs.





~ Theodore Roethke
from News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness
edited by Robert Bly

 

 

when the lamp went out

When they plow their fields

and sow seeds in the earth,

when they care for their wives and children, 

young brahmans find riches.

But I've done everything right

and followed the rule of my teacher.

I'm not lazy or proud.

Why haven't I found peace?

Bathing my feet 

I watched the bathwater

spill down the slope.

I concentrated my mind

the way you train a good horse.

The I took the lamp

and went into my cell,

checked the bed,

and sat down on it.

I took a needle

and pushed the wick down.

When the lamp went out

my mind was freed.

~ Patacara, (6th B.C.E.)

from Women in Praise of the Sacred

edited by Jane Hirshfield

.

understanding fails

If one reaches the point where understanding fails, this is not a tragedy: it is simply a reminder to stop thinking and start looking.  Perhaps there is nothing to figure out after all: perhaps we only need to wake up.

A monk said: "I have been with you (Master), for a long time, and yet I am unable to understand your way.  How is this?"

The Master said: "Where you do not understand, there is the point for your understanding."

In the first two chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians, St. Paul distinguishes between two kinds of wisdom: one which consists in the knowledge of words and statements, a rational, dialectical wisdom, and another which is at once a matter of paradox and of experience, and goes beyond the reach of reason.  To attain to this spiritual wisdom, one must first be liberated from servile dependence on the "wisdom, of speech."

St. Paul compares this knowledge of God, in the Spirit, to the subjective knowledge that a man has of himself.  Just as no one can know my inner self except my own "spirit," so no one can know God except God's Spirit; yet this Holy Spirit is given to us, in such a way that God know Himself in us, and this experience is utterly real, though it cannot be communicated in terms understandable to those who do not share it.  Consequently, St. Paul concludes, "we have the mind of Christ."

~ Thomas Merton

excerpts from Zen and the Birds of Appetite

art by Van Gogh

.

an older unity

And the deepest level of communication 

is not communication, 

but communion. It is wordless. 

It is beyond words, 

and it is beyond speech, 

and it is beyond 

concept. 

Not that we discover a new unity. 

We discover an older unity. 

My dear brothers, we are already one. 

But we imagine that we are not. 

And what we have to recover is our original unity. 

What we have to be is what we are.

~ Thomas Merton

from his Asian journal
art by Van Gogh

 

ask the horse

There is a story in Zen circles about a man and a horse. 

The horse is galloping quickly, and it appears that the man on the horse is going somewhere important. Another man, standing alongside the road, shouts, 'Where are you going?" and the first man replies, I don't know! Ask the horse!" This is also our story. We are riding a horse, we don't know where we are going, and we can't stop. The horse is our habit energy pulling us along, and we are powerless. 

We are always running, and it has become a habit. 
We struggle all the time, even during our sleep. 
We are at war within ourselves, and we can easily start a war with others.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

from "The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching"